After three grisly seasons spent chasing serial killers on The Following, Kevin Bacon is back with some lighter—but no less psychologically crafty—fare. In Amazon’s I Love Dick Bacon plays a comically enigmatic scholar who fires up more than the creativity of a couple (Kathryn Hahn and Griffin Dunne) at a Texas artists’ community. Oh, and his name is Dick, so get your minds out of the gutter. Bacon gives us the goods.

How did this project come about? I love [Dick executive producer] Jill Soloway and [her show] Transparent. Then Kathryn Hahn came on board, and she is just off the chain. And I really didn’t want to do blood and guts for a while, you know what I mean? If you look at the movies I’ve done, a lot of time I’ll switch genres. I don’t really stay in one kind of world.

Had you worked with Jill before? No, but they sent the script, and then she and I had a Skype session. I like to joke that even sight-unseen, every woman in my life was like, “You’re doing this. The show is called I Love Dick, it’s with Jill Soloway, you’re doing it.” I was trying to go through my decision-making process, but my daughter, my wife, my women friends, they were like, “There’s no need to think about it!”

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What can you tell us about Dick? I think he’s at a crossroads in his life, which is a good place to meet a character. He’s just questioning a lot of different stuff: who he is, what he’s done with his life, what his relationship is to women. And here comes Kathryn Hahn’s character [to this community], who he wasn’t expecting. There’s a certain amount of sexual tension between them, because I feel like he’s the kind of guy who approaches things, for lack of a better word, with his d--k.

The title could prove to be problematic. Someone already came up to me and said that they got in trouble at work because they were searching for it on their computer. Yeah, it’s not necessarily surprising, but if you look up 'I Love Dick', you get a lot of interesting stuff. [Laughs]